Panel presses NSA on surveillance

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WASHINGTON Senators of both parties on Wednesday sharply challenged the National Security Agency's collection of records of all domestic phone calls.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., accused Obama administration officials of overstating the success of the domestic call log program. He said he had been shown a classified list of “terrorist events” detected through surveillance and that it did not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” had been thwarted by the domestic program.

“If this program is not effective, it has to end. So far, I'm not convinced by what I've seen,” Leahy said, citing the “massive privacy implications” of keeping records of every American's domestic calls.

At the start of the hearing, the administration released classified documents outlining the rules for how the domestic phone records may be accessed and used by intelligence analysts.

The Obama administration has been trying to build public support for its surveillance programs by arguing that they are subject to strict safeguards and court oversight and that they have helped thwart as many as 54 terrorist events. That figure, Leahy emphasized, relies upon conflating another program that allows surveillance targeted at noncitizens abroad, which has apparently been quite valuable, with the domestic one.

John C. Inglis, the deputy director of the NSA, said there had been 13 investigations in which the domestic call tracking program made a “contribution.” He cited two discoveries: that several men in San Diego were sending money to a terrorist group in Somalia, and that a suspect already under scrutiny in a subway bomb plot was using a different phone.

The top Republican on the committee, Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, asked skeptical questions about the legal basis for the program while criticizing the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, for making inaccurate statements about it in March to Congress. Clapper has since apologized.

“Nothing can excuse this kind of behavior from a senior administration official of any administration, especially on matters of such grave importance,” he said.

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